Targeting and retargeting ads in social networks are efficient way to reach your potential customers (target audience) and get a high ROMI = return on marketing investment. Let's have a look at the targeting and retargeting options in Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, VK and Odnoklassniki.

There are 29 companies in Finland that have more than 5000 followers in LinkedIn. Nokia is clearly number 1 having nearly 500,000 followers when considering both Nokia and Nokia's Network Business, which have separate LinkedIn pages. Nokia is Followed by Kone, Tieto and Metso, but the gap is large, as these companies have around 37,000 followers.

Targeting your ads to a specific target audience saves money and provides high ROMI = return on marketing investment. But what is retargeting?

Let’s start from the general definition. Retargeting is a form of marketing in which you target users who have previously visited your website using web-based ads aimed specifically at them. In order to be able to serve ads to people who have visited your site, it is necessary to place a cookie on the user’s browser when he visits your site.Retargeting allows that you can target users with ads who have showed interested in your product or service.

Besides the conventional definition, today retargeting includes much more, as we are about to see below.

Ads cost money, whether we are talking about traditional or digital media. Search engine marketing (Pay-per-click) and targeted ads in social media among others are efficient ways to reach your target audience, but this all costs money, which some companies do not have. Spamming emails to large email lists is popular in Russia, but email marketing is less effective than in the West, and you can hardly reach 250 000 people unless you have been heavily investing in collecting quality email / CRM databases (or have bought one). This also costs money.